in before i get people in my mentions like "but what about my helpless wife and my poor daughter whomst is ill with the whooping cough!!!"

all the revolutionaries and activists and people who fought back we read about in history? they were not all single twenty-somethings with nothing to lose. they were often fighting *for* they families and the families of others.

only you can assess to what extent you can take action but for crikey's sake you're not going to go to jail 80 years if you go to a rally

as a good friend of mine put it:

"You are taking a small but not insignificant risk of getting arrested whenever you drive a car, but you do it anyway because it is necessary. The same goes for political action"

@meena they didn't have video and audio of the camps though

@shel we've had video & audio of what's effectively executions of black men and black boys for years now.

and the only thing that's happening is that white people are complaining about all the black folks who are locking up highways with their loud protests about some thing or the other.

@meena yup
point being
we're worse than the Good Germans

@shel i'm worried and scared to an extent that i'm afraid to even put into words.

@meena lean into it imo. let yourself feel negative emotions. let it course through you and process it and experience the full breadth of it until it grows and evolves into bravery and action

@shel i'm not sure what value my negativity about america has.

as far as "bravery" and action goes, i can offer anyone a sofa, open arms, my change, my phone, on this part of the earth that's not in war yet.
they don't even need to ask.

and i can offer the "wisdom" i've brought with me from fleeing war barely even knowing it.

@meena Are you in another country? As acts of international solidarity, you could hold actions pressuring institutions and governments to sanction, boycott, and divest from the U.S. as much as is possible (i know there's a limit)

@shel i'm from Bosnia, I grew up in Austria. I now live in Germany.

(aaand, yes… My company has always had a policy of not using any resources from the US. Previously it was simply that the privacy standards weren't quite up to european standards, as now everyone knows thanks to GDPR. then along came 2014 / snowden… and… then it just went downhill.)

@meena you could also get involved and try to do base-building/dual-power organizing in your own home to try and foster a strong socialist movement that could resist imperialism.

https://www.communistlaborparty.org/seattle/index.php/dual-power/

https://philadelphiapartisan.com/2017/07/20/base-building-activist-networking-or-organizing-the-unorganized-tim-horras/

@shel as non-german citizen i'm afraid i have no voting rights in germany… which might also preclude me from founding a political party. But we do have a pretty cool communist / socialist collection of parties… that i can't vote for.

@meena you don't need to vote to organize a socialist movement; and nobody needs to know you can't/aren't voting

@shel Not everyone who isn't doing things is doing it out of fear of getting punished. Some of us are straight up *incapable*.

@keiyakins I'm also autistic and afraid of crowds and I'm only good at telephones cuz i worked at a call center living under the poverty line cuz nobody else would hire me.

and i don't know how you got "Worse than nazis" from my post. You're not worse than the nazis. You're worse than the germans living in nazi germany who knew what was happening but did nothing.

@keiyakins and despite my autism, and anxiety, and being trans, and having disabilities, and having no fiscal safety net no blood family to fall back on, despite all of that

I blockaded a DHS office and went to jail. and guess what

You can do shit without going to jail or being in crowds

@shel ... I might have gotten a little aggressive. I'm just sick of being told that if I'm not going to physical protests I'm doing nothing. I'm doing what I can, but transportation is an issue, strangers are an issue, there's a lot of things I just can't do.

@keiyakins join a movement and find a way to help out it's not all protests. It's not OK to do nothing but these symbolic rallies where you stand in a crowd and chant aren't even the primary effective way to fight back so like get creative find another way

@keiyakins Like the guy who used an HTML scraper to pull every single ICE officer off of LinkedIn and posted their names and faces with their titles and cities.

Like the people who late at night poster around town the faces of ICE agents in the area

The people who sabotage ICE vehicles while nobody is looking

@keiyakins the people who archived the ICE roster before DHS could take it down. the people who find out where ICE detention centers are. the people who provide rides to undocumented members of their community to help them avoid getting pulled over by ICE. the people who repair breaklights. etc. etc.

@keiyakins you're underselling your abilities to help out.

If you do nothing you're complicit. If you seriously assess your own personal situation and you really seriously can't do anything

you're still complicit but u have an excuse.

@keiyakins I don't know your personal situation but I just don't have any sympathies left for oh wah wah how dare you make a generic call to action because I personally have anxiety and am very fragile and can't just ignore this post if i don't like it.

Because there are people who to be fucking honest can do shit but aren't because they are prioritizing not feel any stress in their relatively comfy lives over people who have no choice but to live with this.

@keiyakins so don't go come into my mentions like "not everyone is as strong and privileged and capable as you" I'm disabled too. I'm trans too. I'm working-class too. I've been to jail. I probably have more diagnoses than most of you and I just don't care. Assess your own life I don't need to hear why you're deciding you can't act it's not my business.

@shel I mean... I write and discuss and try to build up the ideas when I can. I made a backup of that data set. I think my representatives are probably sick of hearing from me. But being unable to drive and stuck living in the fucking suburbs with no mass transit blocks pretty much every avenue that involves leaving the house. And it felt like you were trying to say it's not okay to consider my limits, to take some time to maintain enough health to not snap. I probably misinterpreted you.

@shel I agree that doing *nothing* isn't okay, but at the same time, people can only push their soft limits so hard before they run into a hard one.

@keiyakins It's not OK to prioritize feeling pleasant feelings and not taking risks to the point that you don't engage and do nothing. It's not OK to sit around retweeting and boosting things and that being all you do. It's not OK to be constantly reassuring everyone that you can be a good person while not doing anything to fight back.

I said in a related post that only you can assess what you're able to do; but you have to make that assessment and leave your comfort zone

@keiyakins i'm 100% there's something people living in the suburbs can do though I can't tell you what it is because I don't know the specifics. I'm sure there's a local DSA or something that has members with some ideas

@keiyakins I used to live in a rural area just outside the suburbs with my dysfunctional parents and could only leave the house by borrowing their car.

i told them i was visiting a friend in newton, took the car, and went to roxbury to join a march and filmed cops.

i asked for money to get pizza and then gave it to local activist orgs.

there's shit you can do

@keiyakins and yeah if you live in the suburbs w/ your parents you are WAY better off than most of us who are taking action. it can be boring and frustrating and depressing but you have a much greater capacity to take risks than I do. If I lose my job I don't really have much to fall back on. my own personal savings, maybe a gofundme. i could lose my medications. my hormones. all sortsa suff

@keiyakins but i'm willing to risk it because it is morally necessary to do so.

so you don't get to tell me i'm being unreasonable by saying that i hate all these posts reassuring everyone it's OK To Do Nothing and how pissed i get when privileged people With Anxiety or other mental issues i also have come into my mentions to complain that I want more people to help fight back

@shel I honestly think we fundamentally agree - we have a duty to do what we can, comfort isn't an excuse. I'm just frustrated with my own lack of agency and taking it out on you... I'll stop now.

@rocket yuuuuppp

it's just difficult to empathize with someone who would see/hear that snuff and STILL not feel a need to take action. I don't understand how that works.

@rocket ooofff that is an image i hadn't thought about... that is upsetting ugh